Three songs into the second album by the Smile, Thom Yorke informs us that he’s had it. “It takes away, it takes the fun out,” he keens, to Read the Room’s vinegary guitar riff. “Maybe I can’t be arsed.” Long-term observers of Yorke’s songwriting might also greet this with a shrug. For decades, his lyrics have mapped out an overcast emotional territory bordered by fear, anger, despair and ennui. So it is on Wall of Eyes. There are twitchy songs inhabited by nameless sources of dread, suggestions that something terrible is happening just out of shot (“Don’t let them take me”, “Stop looking over our shoulder”), and a song called I Quit. The subjects are usually oblique (the protagonist of the title track could be an oligarch or tech billionaire; the backstabbing “user” who is “standing in my light” on You Know Me! might be a hanger-on, or a critic, or someone else entirely), but the mood is much as ever. There is one fabulously improbable moment in Bending Hectic, which depicts Yorke cruising through the Italian countryside in “a vintage soft-top from the 60s”, but don’t panic: it’s merely a precursor, a bit of scene-setting before the song is consumed by Ballardian thoughts of automotive suicide. Normal service is thus resumed.
